Affecting the Powers of the Next Commander-in-Chief

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

While the public and the press seem totally focused on the presidential election six months from now, members of Congress are preparing to vote in coming weeks on legislation that that will affect the powers of that next Commander-in-Chief and the structure of his or her Defense Department.

Being rushed through the Congress, so members can get off to campaign for re-election, are both the fiscal 2017 Defense Authorization Bill, providing the legal authority for next year’s spending and the fiscal Appropriations Bill, which provides the exact sums for each program. Both measures contain wide differences between the House and Senate versions on financing the roughly $603 billion fiscal 2017 Pentagon budget, but more about that later.

Less discussed are changes being proposed to the country’s national security structure that are contained in the authorization measures that will be debated in the coming days in both the House and Senate. These would be the first major ones since the Goldwater-Nichols Act that was passed 30 years ago.

Start with authorization legislation that by law would limit the size of the president’s National Security Council (NSC) staff. It’s been a pet, bipartisan issue for many members concerned that the number of staffers has grown from less than 100 in the Reagan years to some 400 under President Barack Obama. The complaint is that NSC staffers at times have appeared to take on more of an operational rather than coordination role.

Of course the current official size, according to the fiscal 2016 White House budget request, was for 76 full time NSC staffers. The other 300 or so are individuals loaned or assigned temporarily from their home agencies – the State, Treasury, Defense Departments or CIA, for example. People seem to have forgotten that Henry Kissinger in the Nixon years had some 200 NSC staffers, though only 50 of them were permanent, professionals.

To change this practice, the authorization bill passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee would limit the NSC staff to 150 permanently assigned professionals but that number includes any detailees from other departments or agencies. That cap would not apply to technical or administrative personnel.

A different approach will be offered this week during House floor debate. Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) will offer an amendment to the authorization bill to cap the NSC staff at 100.  However, if the new President wants a higher number, it would kick in a requirement that the National Security adviser be confirmed by the Senate and be subject to being called to testify before Congress, something previous advisers have not agreed to do.

Another change being proposed by both Armed Services Committees is to extend the term of the Joint Chiefs chairman from two years to four.  The House version would allow the four years to be extended only in time of war. The Senate measure would stagger the four-year term so that it would not coincide with a president’s four years in office.

Both committees legislatively plan to do away with the Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs), policy papers put together by the Pentagon every four years and timed to a presidential election. Both congressional panels criticized past QDRs for being consensus-driven, with the Senators arguing they “do little to inform the Congress, not least because the reports are all unclassified.”

Under the House committee plan, the Defense Secretary every four years would write a National Defense Strategy, but each year would provide program and budgetary direction for development of the force. The Joint Chiefs chairman would prepare the National Military Strategy, implementing the secretary’s policies with actual numbers, in consultation with the chiefs of the military services and the commanders of the unified and specified combatant commanders. In order to be specific, this document should be classified, the committee noted in its report.

The Senate committee bill echoes the House approach although its National Security Strategy would be classified with an unclassified summary. The National Military Strategy would be primarily specifying “the military’s role in executing the National Defense Strategy,” according to the committee.

Both House and Senate bills pick up a proposal from Defense Secretary Ash Carter, delegating to the Joint Chiefs chairman legal authority to carry out reallocation of limited military assets on a short-term basis, based on prior policy guidance from the secretary.

They also have agreed with another Carter recommendation to reduce the number of general officers and limit the number of three-star slots in combatant commands.

The House, however, approved upgrading Cyber Command to a Unified Combatant Command for Cyber Operations. The Senate instead created the post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information, who would oversee the Defense Department’s cyber information networks as well as cyber war fighting activities. Cyber Command would remain as a sub-unit under Strategic Command.

The Senate committee, which has been critical of the growth of Combatant Commands, has directed the next Defense Secretary to create what would be a controversial pilot program. Under the Senate bill, one combatant commander would replace his or her service components with joint task forces focused on operational military missions. Using this approach, the committee says it would improve “the integration of operational efforts across the command, streamlining unnecessary layers of management, and reducing the number of staff.”

The budgetary differences between the House and the Senate will create the biggest legislative problems in the coming weeks.

One major funding issue this year, as it has been in the past, is Republicans wanting to use Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) funds, which pay for the fighting in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, to pay for what are essentially defense base budget activities. The OCO war fighting money does not count under the fund limitations for the defense base budget number set by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The Obama fiscal 2017 OCO request was for $58.8 billion, but the administration agreed that it would allow $5 billion to go for base budget expenditures. That left about $54 billion in the OCO account to pay for all 12 months of fiscal 2017 fighting expenses.

The Republican-run House Armed Services committee in the authorization bill and the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee in their appropriation bill have approved taking $18 billion out of the $54 billion the Obama administration sought to pay for the wars and use it to increase funds selected by those committees for base budget items their members wanted covered.

The House Armed Services committee then authorized just $36 billion for real war fighting OCO expenses, but only until April 30, 2017, forcing the next president to request supplementary funding to pay for fighting from that date through September 30, 2017, the end of the fiscal year.

Commenting on the House Armed Service approach, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the OCO account would need another $20 billion in supplementary funds to cover May 1 through September 30, 2017.

Defense Secretary Carter recently called the House committee’s ploy, “gambling with war fighting money at a time of war – proposing to cut off our troops’ funding in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria in the middle of the year.”

The Senate committee, on the other hand, followed the Obama budget that contained $58.8 billion for the OCO account, transferring only $5 billion for base budget functions, the amount that the president also proposed.

In another big difference, the House committee approved a 2.1 percent pay increase for military service personnel in fiscal 2017, while the Senate went along with the 1.6 percent raise proposed by the Obama administration. The difference between the two pay levels would amount to some $330 million next year, a minor element in Pentagon terms but a big figure in almost any other department’s budget.

While the presidential candidates talk in broad terms about building up the U.S. military, the Congress – with little public attention – is actually about to legislate real changes in the national security structure.

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